Humphrey Bogart

Actor

Born: 25 December 1899

Died: 14 January 1957 (cancer)

Birthplace: New York, New York

Best known as:

Rick Blaine in Casablanca

Name at birth: Humphrey DeForest Bogart

As much an influential screen personality as an actor, Humphrey Bogart played the bravely cynical saloonkeeper Rick Blaine in the beloved 1942 film Casablanca. Bogart was never exactly a typical handsome movie star; he got his start playing mostly thuggish gangsters in the 1930s. By the '40s Bogart had graduated to playing tough detectives like Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941), and silent, suffering romantics like Blaine in Casablanca. He won an Oscar for his offbeat role as a drunken boat pilot in The African Queen (1952, with Katharine Hepburn). For years a champion smoker and drinker, Bogart had a cancerous growth removed from his esophagus in 1956, but died a year later.

Extra credit:

Bogart was 5'8" tall, according to his official site... He was married to actress Lauren Bacall, his co-star in The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not, from 1945 until his death in 1957. She was 25 years his junior. He was also married three times previously... Bogart played another icon of detective fiction, Philip Marlowe, in The Big Sleep... Some sources list Bogart's birthdate as 23 January 1899, believing that studio executives moved the date to Christmas Day for publicity purposes.